Tracking Transit: How much is public transit worth?

Dan Chatman, assistant professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, confirmed a link between public transportation, worker productivity and increased wages by creating a model that can accurately predict the financial benefits different public transit systems bring to the cities they serve.

“There aren’t a lot of people in my field who do work that’s really highly quantitative and data oriented. It has some pretty significant implications for transit investments in large cities," Chatman said. Chatman collaborated with Robert Noland of Rutgers to create a research model, a complex set of equations that pulled data from more than 300 metropolitan areas around the United States. The data showed that increasing transit services significantly improves the productivity of workers in metropolitan areas.

Public transit allows more employees to aggregate in dense urban areas, explains Chatman, and the more they do, the more productive and innovative they are. Increasing transportation seats or rail service miles into urban areas ten percent can bring in as much as $1.5 million to $1.8 billion per metropolitan area, with economic benefits increasing if the city is large or has an existing transit system in place.

Chatman says he’s had inquiries from around the world about the paper, and cities are already considering this information in planning their transit systems.

Click here to stream Chatman's interview on KALW Local Public Radio on how public transportation affects economic mobility.